


Seaglass

by HerbertBest



Category: Game Grumps
Genre: Adventure, Castaways, Desert Island, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Learning to Love The Ocean, Mercreatures, Mermen, Survival, falling overboard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 02:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11819778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerbertBest/pseuds/HerbertBest
Summary: Dan Avidan was always scared of the ocean.  Then he found himself castaway on a semi-deserted island, and a special friend taught him that the ocean could be surprisingly giving, friendly...and filled with challenges all its own.





	Seaglass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fallenandscatteredpetals](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallenandscatteredpetals/gifts).



> This was written for Bell (asinglepetal/Fallenandscatteredpetals), who wanted a fic about Dan interacting with her Dan-based merman, Blue. Blue is nonverbal and a bit of a wild creature, and I've done my best to write him as Bell created him.

Dan Avidan was afraid of the ocean.

It was a fact that everyone seemed to know about him – that he feared the open ocean more than death. It was vast and unknowing, ink-colored at night and placid blue in the morning – it was bigger than himself, beyond his control, beyond reasoning with or hoping for, rolling over his head, overwhelming. They knew, too, that he was afraid of sharks, their sharp, digging, wicked teeth. That the vastness of the unknown made his heart stop, and not in a happy, joyful way but in a this-is-terrifying-and-beyond-me-save-me-please way. 

What he was doing on a boat, rocking back and forth with the stomach-churning lurch of the ocean, trying not to faint while attending this stupid work party, was beyond him at the moment. It was his job to be professional and reasonable; it was his job to smile and keep smiling while people offered to booze it up with him or tried to take pictures. Dan could barely keep his face from turning green, but he was a nice guy – and didn’t let anyone know that he was suffering wildly. 

But he was a nice guy – determined, intelligent, and gentle with others. He could barely force himself to smile and make a good impression as he bit back bile, but he did it, white fingertips shaking against the base of his champagne glass, and his eyes turned toward the skyline, which was constant, still and unmoving. He was alone here – the clients were inside the boat and they were chugging back toward Catalina, where they’d have dinner at a high-class, five-star restaurant and he and Arin would hopefully end up endorsing Game Grumps branded sneakers. It would be over, and he would be on firm land once more.

Dan didn’t know if he wanted to write a song or throw up, but his emotions were intense, somehow right under the surface, as if someone had drawn a razor right over his heart. He liked the ocean but being in it always made him feel sick, terribly, heavily sick, as if he were holding a brick in his gut. It weighed every bit of him to the earth, making him feel as if he were the central to gravity itself. He bit back panic. He was going to be swallowed up by it, dragged cold and broken into an uncaring marble womb.

That was his last thought before the ship pitched sideways and dumped him headfirst through the cold black heart of darkness and into the ocean itself.

 

*** 

 

Dan knew how to swim. This was, he thought, an important point, and one he kept on repeating every time someone brought this story up. He totally knew how to swim, okay, the water was just very, very choppy, and his bearings were all screwed up, and it was very, very dark underwater. 

And the ocean was big, so big, bigger than it had been even in his nightmares. The unknown surrounded him, kept him immobile, kept him completely paralyzed by the horror of what beat against his flesh. 

Dan felt his lungs filled with water and all of his childhood fears came screaming back to vivid, nightmarish life. He was going to die here – die in the black water, die by something unfathomable, die without anyone knowing he was gone. The panic in his throat was overwhelmingly strong. He kicked and struck out, trying to get some kind of traction, trying to fight the pull of the water.

That was when two cool arms surrounded his waist and pulled him back and away from the sandy, warm, soft-looking depths, into safety of the warm air, the surface world. The moonlight.

And Dan, once he hit that surface, once he felt sand against the back of his thighs, promptly passed out. But to his credit, he passed out calmly.

 

*** 

 

For ages there was nothing. Blank peacefulness that was as holy and black as if he’d been knocked unconscious and stripped of all action, weight or personality descended upon Dan, and he soaked in it. 

Then reality seeped in. He felt cold wetness all around himself, pressing into his chest and all down his legs, turning his skin clammy, making him feel rather thoroughly gross. He forced his eyes open, and met with the sight of a pure blue and star-spangled sky. He smiled to himself. What a pretty sight –sweet and calm. A total antithesis to the icy cold he’d been plunged into.

Dan squeezed his eyes tightly shut and hoped that maybe, somehow, he’d dreamed the entire disaster. That he’d wake up somewhere safer, at least, and better than this. 

Instead he took a large salmon right to the face.

Dan jerked into a sitting position, spouting seawater. He flung his gaze toward the place of impact but found nothing there. No one at all. Just a fish lying flopping next to his cringing face.

Great. He was living out his own personal horror movie, and it had a dying fish in it. Terror filled his voice as he called out.

“Hello?” He rubbed his skinny upper arms. “Hello?”

No one replied, and he hoped his yelling sounded more intelligent than it did in his own head. Had he conjured it? Had the water dragged the fish onto the shore? 

That was when he saw a flash. White, pure white, out of the corner of his eye. 

He didn’t realize what it was until another fish until it hit him square in the nose at full speed, and then he was reeling back in pain. “Fuckin’ quit it with that shit, man!” he shouted into the oblivion around him, fed up the situation already – and with whoever was playing a prank on him. He followed the track of the fish with his eyes, straining to see in the gloomy half-lit night. He noticed a fat, long drag mark in the sand by the shoreline, and then and then spotted someone sitting up on the rocks – long and languid-looking, watching him cautiously.

Yeah, he saw a person. Really, saw it. 

It being a merman.

The thought struck him as completely implausible, even lunatic, but he was staring right at the creature, and it was half-fish and half human, glowering down at him with an intense look from a high cliff a few feet over his head.

“Uh…hi….thanks for the fish? Both of them?” He shielded his eyes from the glow of the moon and tried to make out the creature’s eyes or nose.

What Dan could see looked hauntingly familiar, from nose to chin. It looked…weirdly like him? Only paler, with blue gills and scales and a long, blue tail.

This wasn’t what he’d imagined the afterlife would hold for him. Or, scarier, his own psyche revolting on him. 

Indeed, Dan wondered briefly if this was the afterlife, and his forever-destiny – an eternity on an island in the middle of the tropics, lost to all who loved him, forever partnered with a weird fish-man who kind of looked like him in the moonlight. The only alternative to falling headfirst into a laughing fit was sarcasm. “Do you know a guy named Avi?” he asked randomly.

By way of answering, the merman screeched down at him, the moonlight bouncing off of his sharp incisors and his inhumanly bright beady eyes. Dan cringed back from the noise, then regretted his haste since the creature was his only support in isolation and – if he were anything like Dan himself – wouldn’t appreciate it. _Sterling job, Daniel. You just make friends wherever you go,_ he thought to himself. “Woah, hey – I’m sorry!” he shouted. That seemed to mollify it for a bit. Bracing itself on white scaly hands, It eyed him warily and, nervously, Dan shuffled his feet. “So how can I help you out?” he asked it. Only fair, since it had gone out of its way to save his life and feed him.

The mercreature eyed him for a few minutes, and then gestured toward a spot a few feet away. Dan could see something gleaming in the distance between them, mostly hidden in the sandy landscape, and when he approached it he realized it was a piece of bright blue seaglass, lying abandoned and forlorn on the teeming beach. “Huh,” he tucked it into his palm and called over his shoulder, “is this what you wanted?”

The merman jabbered down at him, and Dan grinned brilliantly. At least he’d figured out how to please it, he thought, climbing up toward the creature, who watched him still with those round eyes.

The closer he came to the mercreature, the more clear the differences between the two of them became. Besides the lack of verbal talent – which meant the poor guy probably couldn’t sing – and the fangs and scales, there was the tail, which looked particularly deadly from this angle.

Same hair, though. Dan supposed he ought to be proud that his genetics or…imagination. Whatever was going on with that combo, his mersona looked pretty damn sweet in the hair department – fluffy and bright and coppery in the moonlight.

Shit. He was totally eye-humping his own visage. That was weird. Very weird. But he’d unpack that idea later. 

Dan offered up the bit of sea glass, smiling. “Here,” he said, briefly feeling the creature’s scaly palms brush his own, a chill spreading over his skin and through his nerves as the creature took it with a smile. “Hope you like it, buddy.” 

After a few minutes of happy jabbering, the merman dragged himself down off the ledge and toward the beach. Dan watched him with curiosity in his eyes. “I guess you can’t stay out of the water long,” he said, as the merman coasted his way into the foamy waves. Dan started to clamber back down to the ground. “I wish you could talk,” he said. “Maybe you could tell me if there’s some driftwood lying around here to start a fire with.”

But the merman was deep in the comforting embrace of the ocean, leaving Dan to his own devices. He sighed and glanced at this new landscape that would now be his home; the island wasn’t very large but it had an area of lush vegetation to the north of the cliff wall next to which he stood. If there were plants there had to be fresh water, which solved one of his problems. Dan wasn’t the most coordinated or handy guy in the world, but he was pretty sure he could make himself a fishing pole, and find something shallow enough to drink out of .

Well, it was better than nothing to have land underfoot and a couple of fish to work with. He gathered them up and placed them safely on a high rock shelf before going off to the other side of the island to search for some dry kindling to work with.

By the time he returned with an armful of kindling and a leaf pouch filled with water, he found that the merman had already deboned the fish and had set out several more leaves filled with fresh water for the two of them to drink. Dan didn’t think about what an effort the merman must be making for him, to be out of water for this long, and to struggle about on the rocky shore with no feet to brace him. 

There had to be a way for him to get better at this whole survival thing more quickly. _Git Gud, Dan,_ he taunted himself, and went about starting a bonfire. It took him what felt like hours to produce actual flames from rocks and sticks like a boy scout, but the fire crackled, and he put the fish on to roast with a satisfied groan, then fell on the water.

The mercreature watched with glittering gaze for the entire time, until Dan gestured for him to come closer, holding out his own leaf of water. It gobbled the whole thing down, leaf and all, and made a satisfied sound. Dan curled his knees up under his chin. 

“There we go. Aww, you’re a friendly guy, aren’t you?”

The mercreature flashed bright, razor-sharp teeth again, and Dan regretted that choice of words. He put the fish on to roast and quietly let them cook until its flesh turned flaky white and he decided it was worth risking eating.

And that was the most satisfying meal he’d had in ages, eaten with his bare hands next to a vaguely threatening merperson who kind of resembled him. “Better than Sugarfish,” he muttered, sitting down with a soft grunt. 

The mercreature sat patiently beside him, licking its lips. Taking half of the second fish, Dan tossed it to the creature, and watched it gobble it down. 

Its belly satisfied, the creature slid on its belly back into the waves. “Thank you!” Dan called after it, but the creature didn’t acknowledge his attention nor his generosity. Fitting for a wild thing, he decided, then slipped onto his back. He added dry kindling to the flames, keeping the fire burning while letting the sound of the soughing waves lull him to sleep. In the morning he’d figure out how to make contact with the outside world, and how to store water.

 

**** 

 

The following morning, Dan managed to figure out how to create a storage jug; he found a waving coconut tree, and after knocking down a few of the sweet fruit and gutting them for their flaky innards and milk, he took them to the flowing river high on the rock face and filled them with water.

“And to think, I always hated coconut,” he mumbled to himself, slugging down the sweet milk and gasping in satisfaction as it filled his stomach. Desperate times called for desperate eating choices, he decided. With the ocean plentifully filled with fish and the coconuts and fresh water here to satiate him, he should be able to survive for a little while until civilization figured out that he’d survived and made it to safety on the small island. He created three strong fishing poles out of driftwood, then connected a fishing line made of coconut twine to each tip, baited with a bit of the meat. Wedging four between cracks on the thick rockface that dipped into the shoreline, Dan could fish without having to keep watch over the poles, allowing him to tend to the business of survival.

Which, at this point, was alerting the outside world that he was alive and waiting for rescues. How to alert them – well, that provided a huge problem. His phone was dead – waterlogged – and he didn’t have any flares. So he used the old rocks-spelling a message approach; big white ones fished from the bottom of the stream, spelling out the word help on the white sand above the tide line. 

Now he needed shelter – something to keep him from roasting to death in the sunlight. He’d explore until he found a cave, or try to make something from the vegetation. 

When the sun set he returned to the beach and his fishing poles. He pulled out rainbow-colored fish this time, four. The amount of dry kindling he’d found had also grown in size thanks to his eager eye. And – to his only moderate surprise – his doppelganger arrived once the scent of roasting fish in the fire he built.

“I guess that’s one more way we’re different,” he observed. The mercreature said nothing affirmative, eyeing Dan over as if he were the most foolish thing on the earth. But they made an odd yet happy pair, hip to hip, tail to foot, one not troubling the other.

And as Dan drifted to sleep the mercreature cooed at his side, sweetly melodic and somehow less eerie than he’d envisioned it sounding. 

 

***

 

The following day brought Dan frustration. He couldn’t manage to put together a shelter of fronds no matter how much he tried. Thick branches refused to stay bound together, and refused to balance on the thin stems.

That was when he heard the sound of his friend querulously chattering behind him. Letting out a squawk of surprise to hear and see him the daylight, the mercreature laughed at his silliness, then began to flop and drag his way across the land, toward the rock outcropping, gesturing with his arm for Dan to come along. Reluctantly, Dan followed, far less surefooted than his friend. But he caught up, and the chattering mercreature slid down the slope of the rocks, over to the lush river Dan had been using for fresh water. He swam his way down the long length of it, then down into a channel well that Dan had dared not yet explore. 

He dove down when Dan hesitated, then surfaced to angrily chatter at him.

“Are you sure?”

More angry chattering. Dan – two days into this folly, wearing through his torn jeans and exhausted from the heat – threw caution to the wind for once. “If you say so,” he grumbled, then held his nose as he threw himself into the chilly water. 

Underneath the channel was a short descent – he followed the gesturing mercreature down into the depths, descending through layers of blue and brown until they saw a narrow path between two sheer walls of black rock. Dan’s thin body allowed him passage through and up the pressing rocks, until he surfaced with a gasp. 

What confronted him was a cave, lit through an opening in the top with beautiful, golden sunlight. Dan’s dazzled eyes scrambled about the interior and he took in every little nook and cranny in silent amazement. The walls were cool and sandy brown, and they provided him shelter from the sun as well as a place to chill his overheated flesh. The cave itself was cool, damp, sheltering, with comfortable room to stretch out on dry rocks when the days seemed too hot.

“Is this like, your special place?” Dan asked. The merperson nodded and jabbered happily. “Huh,” Dan muttered. Pulling himself out of the water, he sat on the rocks to dry out. “And you’re willing to share it with me sometimes?”

It jabbered happily, and Dan – lying down to rest – took it as a happy yes.

 

****

 

Time passed on. Dan learned how to forage for grubs and kept fishing; he kept picking up coconuts and forcing them down, and kept getting fresh water from the stream and corking it up in coconut shells. He fashioned a knife from sea-glass and driftwood. He stayed in the shade whenever possible to keep his skin from burning, and swam in the ocean to keep himself from overheating.

His old fears had utterly dissolved. He could float for hours in the belly of the ocean without fearing it; he could watch a shark swim harmlessly by without panicking. And Dan loved it – indeed, at this point it was almost a relief to be free of old phobias and to simply deal with his day to day life. No worries about album releases; no concerns about saying the right thing. No appointments to make. Indeed, no female presences to impress. Just him and the mercreature who resembled him, And every single day, the merman came with fish and drank his fresh water, taking nothing more than seaglass and flotsam for his reward. He supposed Dan would be like that – were he half-fish.

The days passed by, no help came, and Dan simply allowed himself to deal with it, to meld with the elements. To take fate as it came.

 

*** 

 

The mercreature was not the sort to ask for help. Dan figured that out while, during one of his late-night swims, he saw it tangled tail-down among a lost sailing hitch. Dan dove toward him, his long arms and longer fingers at the ready, untangling the mess he’d gotten himself into. But it was a struggle for the frantic creature to stay still. Wild as it was, and clearly in pain, it didn’t brook his interference for very long. But with hard work, Dan managed to remove the creature from its snare and send it off on its own way.

The merman glared over its shoulder, jabbering angrily, its horrible teeth gnashing and stirring up bubbles in its wake, but Dan watched it leave proudly. He’d saved it from death.

He’d done something good for another living creature, and that was worth being proud of.

 

*** 

 

The following day, he found the creature sitting on the rocky cliff, pouting and glaring at his tail. There was a tiny, thin cut upon it – Dan reasoned to himself that it must feel awful when plunged into salt water.

“Hey there!” Did you hurt yourself?”

The mercreature threw a rock at him, because of course it did. Dan dodged it and cursed, then frowned up at the creature. “Hey! All I want to do is help you! There’s no reason to be angry about that.”

The creature glowered down at him but said nothing. Dan sighed. 

“I think I have something that might help?” Dan held out his left hand, into which he’d tucked a sprig of aloe. He’d found a plant of it, nestled among the rocks – a sign that the island had definitely been inhabited by human beings at some point. 

The mercreature pouted and crossed its arms over its chest, looking away. That effortlessly got Dan’s dander up. 

“That’s not cool man. If you don’t want my help, you can say so, or uh…gesture so. Anyway, I’m not going to take crap from you!”

Silence passed between them. Dan turned to leave.

This time the rock whizzed right past his ear. 

Dan was ready to start yelling – the one thing he never did, the one thing that he’d utterly avoided doing for years and years and years of his life. But when he turned about the mercreature was watching him with large eyes, its tail flapping weakly against the rocks.

“If you promise not to throw anything at me,” Dan said, “I’ll be very careful not to hurt you more than I have to.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is that a deal?”

The growling noise the creature made was more affirmative, and he carefully slid his long body over to make room for Dan on the rocks. He was still and quiet when Dan applied the balm, and tore a strip from his own shirt as a bandage. But he seemed kinder, more grateful, than he’d ever been as he swam away with a huff, an annoyed toss of the tail. Dan simply sat and contemplated his retreat.

He never thought his weird merperson doppelganger would ever be a normal sight, but that was exactly what it was at this point.

 

**** 

 

Two weeks later, the creature came to him while he was resting in the grotto alone – and there was legitimate fear in his face.

“What’s wrong?”

The excited jabbering was incredibly frantic, staccato this time – filled with a new fear Dan had never heard in the mercreature’s voice before. He dove back down without another word to Dan, and Dan, with a deep breath, with a grimace, dove down to follow him.

They swam down between the rocky cracks, out into the dark black water – toward something large that looked much like a mass of balloons, hiding under the waves, a bomb, a cancerous tumor that threatened the ecology of the ocean entire. 

It took Dan a moment to realize that it wasn’t a bomb at all – but a cluster of merpeople, stuck in an oversized net, swimming and pushing and clustered together and against each other. They all resembled Dan’s friend, with pale skin, gills of different colors, and hair of varying color and varying puffiness. They eyed him with similar wariness as Dan stared them down, acknowledging that he was their only salvation, but that they only had so much work to do from their trapped position - held underwater and held still, they struggled hopelessly toward Dan’s hands.

Dan caught sight of his fishly double, of the sadness in his eyes – he kept making sounds low in his throat that Dan could almost hear in spite of the depth of their wallowing, a muffled version of his mournful singing. His own eyes went dark at what loomed before them – at the possibility of the exhaustion of the species’ wholesale death. Dan knew without words that these were his mercreature’s people, and he knew that without a doubt that if he did nothing they would die – and the creature who had defended him so thoroughly and with begrudging friendliness would end up alone, without his pod, the last of his kind.

Dan squared up. He locked eyes with the wider ones of those watching him. He knew he had very little time to get the knot pulled apart before he ran out of air. He found a loose loop of rope and pulled and pulled, his free hand slashing with his handmade knife and his feet kicking along and against the waves. His action seemed to pull the entire pod out of its torpor; they began to move as one toward the wall of the net; to reach out with their own hands, finding loose loops in the net, pulling as hard as they could, even the smallest of hands doing their duty. Dan felt lightheaded, dizzy, as the mercreature came to join him him, but kept sawing, kept kicking, his own determination nearly the only thing keeping his feet kicking, his lungs starved for oxygen, his muscles so very tired.

The rope frayed with his sawing. Frayed and began to twist and snap. Even as his sight grew blurry, even as his efforts seemed all the more waterlogged – even as Dan felt consciousness itself making him numb and stupefied, killing off his sense of reason, making him lose faith and logic in the same horrible breath – he could feel the progress. With one last frantic swipe he slid the knife across the rope and felt it give way, then tried to swim for the surface. But that one last effort left him panting, gasping, alone. He had no real control over his own sluggishness, no ability to move toward the light that taunted him and the oxygen that sweetly beckoned over his head. Dan’s fingers splayed out, the knife slipping from his grip, and his body lost in stasis as he gave himself up to nothingness, to oblivion and to silence.

 

 

*** 

 

Light came filtering back to him. Bit by bit, wave by wave, images teased him.

A tail, sunfish-bright- flipping in the dark water like a glinting rainbow.

A series of hands, boosting him to the surface of the water, passing him end over end until his body felt warmth, a breeze, and the heat of the sun.

The sight of several hundred merpeople, waving goodbye, their pale arms anemone tendrils on the black of the bottom of the ocean, flitting away; once there, then gone, a motion picture show forever etched on the backs of his eyelids.

Then there was serenity again, blackness, peace.

 

*** 

 

The next thing Dan felt was his body hitting something heavy and solid, forcing seawater up out of his lungs and through his nose. His eyes flew open as he choked, as the water gushed forth from every single hole in his face.

“Whelp. Better out than in, I always say.”

Dan looked in the direction of the voice. There was a burly man squatting over him with a salt and pepper beard, and several more standing about. All of them were wearing heavy, dark clothing; the sort a person wore if they were going to be out at sea for a long time. He tried to smile but his facial muscles wouldn’t move – they still felt like Jell-O.

“The ship’s medic’s gonna be coming around soon,” the squatting man said, patting him on the back. He stood, adding, “Old Jake, he’ll fix you right up, and you’ll be back eating four squares in no time. We’re two days out from the coast of Santa Barbara, so soon you’ll be back on the main land. Do you have anyone you’d like to talk to?”

Another man burst into the cabin – steerage, Dan realized, they must have carried him off the deck and thrown him here to pump the water from his lungs. He stared at Dan with new knowledge, with the power that only celebrity could bring to the leveling experience of existence.

Then, suddenly, the captain spoke up. “Are you Leigh Daniel Avidan?”

It took Dan a good four seconds for the information to really process. He was going to be home; he was going to have his life back. 

He was going to go back to the life of shallowness that had so plagued him, when he was afraid of the ocean.

But home meant Arin. Home meant his music, and Brian. Home meant Mom and Deb. And home, for all of its faults, was a place where he could spread the truth about what was going on out there – even if he had to speak out against the fishermen who’d saved his life. If he’d learned anything on that island it was that he could take care of himself, and that all of the doubts he’d been harboring were self-made as those fishing poles.

“I am,” he said, in a voice of croaky disuse.

 

*** 

 

_Two Weeks Later_

“I’m going back in!” 

Arin laughed at Dan’s enthusiasm. They’d headed together as a family to celebrate his return, Suzy, Dan, Arin, Ross, Barry and Holly, and the beach had been warm and sweet and welcoming. “Dude, why are you so into the ocean all of a sudden?”

The hot ocean breeze made Dan grin. He was still (and alarmingly) skinnier than he had been before, and well-tanned from his experience – and of course he’d kept the truth of who had helped and saved him on the island close to his chest. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the whole ‘trapped on an island alone for days thing.”

“Fair,” Arin said. “ but it’s something else…something different. It’s like you’re less afraid of the world.”

Dan supposed he was right. He’d would never be afraid of the ocean again. Not its unpredictability, or the depths of its darkness or its wild uncertainty. For he had found a friend there, and though the friendship had been rocky, he had learned well from him. 

“I grew up a little, I guess,” he said, and kept his eyes on the horizon for a tail bearing a strip of cloth ripped from a Def Leppard teeshirt.

**Author's Note:**

> Like this story? Wanna read some more? Come hang out at my [Tumblr!](http://devilgate-drive.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thank you to Angel for betaing this!


End file.
